Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive; he created the Progie Awards in 2007 to highlight the year’s best progressive films and filmmakers. Rampell is the author of the 2005 book Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and the coauthor of three other film history books, most recently The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
The film, chronicling the Pentagon Papers, is extremely of the moment as another tyrannical president seeks to undermine the free press as he and his administration are under investigation.more
From October of 1947 to roughly 1960, more than 300 artists were banned from working in the movies by HUAC unless they recanted their lefty politics. Seventy years later, this event is reenacted.more
Tinseltown’s formula for dramatizing actual political controversies is to combine an entertaining, plot-driven storyline with history, compelling characters, and star power.more
An ideal film to open over Labor Day weekend, Dolores is a stand-up-and-cheer biopic about one of the American left’s iconic heroes, Dolores Huerta.more
With stunning cinematography, bizarre sensuality, and heaps of humor, Jodorowsky recounts in creative, entertaining ways his adolescence growing up Jewish in Chile (his parents had emigrated from Russia)more
"I hear this “Pow!” and look over and people are fleeing and I see Erin limping away, clearly in pain. I thought, Oh, my God! Why did they shoot Erin?"more
The image of Assange that emerges in "Risk" is complex, contradictory, controversial, and often troubling—and he may have severed ties with Poitras as a result.more
“This Land is Our Land! This Land is Our Land! It is not your land, because it’s our land! Because we bought it. That’s why it’s our land! This land belongs to him and me! ”more